The Moz Blog

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we go underneath the surface and bring to light some hidden factors in online marketing. These often overlooked details can have a huge impact in helping us accomplish our goals as online marketers. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Please note that we shot this week's Whiteboard Friday on a brand new video camera and we still need to work out a few kinks. I apologize for the slight purple tint on the Whiteboard.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about the goals that we try to get people to accomplish on the Web, the things that we're trying to accomplish as online marketers, and what we're trying to optimize for, things like: click-through rate from search results; getting people to subscribe to RSS and e-mail; getting them to click links that are posted on social networks; getting them to share things on social networks, on blogs, on websites of all kinds; getting them to convert from browsing to buying; completing a free trial or downloading a white paper and giving you their information; staying a customer of a subscription product. These goals that we have are traditionally done through optimization tactics that we've talked about many, many times here. But there are hidden factors. There are things that hide beneath the surface that impact and affect all of these, all of the success rates and the conversion rates and the goal rates that you have. They can be so subtle sometimes and so hidden beneath the surface that we don't even realize what's going on. That's what I want to talk about today.

So in terms of impacting all of these items, there's traditional stuff that we know, we talk about. So things like, oh, and the click-through rate for the search results, I know that position matters. I know that getting a rich snippet matters. If I can have little stars next to mine; if I can have a picture, a photo, or a video, that usually increases click-through rate. I know that if I'm in special kinds of results, that can either increase or decrease my results. I know if I've got a listing and an indented listing below, that can help me. I know that with subscriptions to RSS and e-mail, I can test different buttons, different versions of the entry form; different calls to action. On links that I click, I can test different titles. All this kind of stuff, there are those traditional testing kinds of things, right?

So in that traditional CRO, that's been covered a ton of times. We don't need to cover this because you often know a lot of the things that are in there. You can find them. They're well-documented. The subtle stuff, the weird stuff is oftentimes around just two questions.

Number one: Does the product or service or thing that you want me to do meet my needs? It could be as simple as: Do I think when I click on this result in the search engine that it will answer the question that I originally asked? But there are so many subtleties that are involved in that, that we never think about, that doing traditional kinds of CRO testing and optimization, we'll never get there.

The second question is: Do I trust and like the brand and/or people behind the brand? This goes to fundamental marketing and branding awareness, and it is so pervasive in all the things that we do, whether it's in web marketing or in offline marketing, and yet oftentimes ignored by marketers like us, who operate in the inbound world of SEO and social media and content marketing and these kinds of things, because we're so analytics driven, that we see a lower click-through rate than we want, a lower conversion rate than we want, a lower subscription rate, a lower sharing rate than we want, and we think, hey, let's test these traditional types of CRO things. Sometimes the problem or the optimization tactics are at a much deeper level.

Let's start with the product/service meeting the needs. There's a bunch of things that go in here. Uptime and reliability is one of the biggest ones. So essentially, if I click a website and it is not speedy, delivering the things that I need, and consistent, I'm going to learn not to trust it, and I'm going to be less likely to click it. This is why you see things like speed being a factor, webpage load speed in Google's rankings, granted a very small factor, but certainly a much bigger factor when you're talking about, "Hey, I'm going to click this, and boy, it's going to take a long time."

I'll give you a good example. I personally think that a lot of the writing at Forbes is pretty darn good. Same with The Wall Street Journal, same with Bloomberg online. But they almost all have interstitial ads and very, very slow page load times. At least in my experience in the past, those websites have done that for me. Almost always have the interstitial, almost always takes a while to load, and then I have to wait through the interstitial. I hate it.

So if I see something else in the search results, a site in social media, I'm going to be less apt to share it. I'm going to be less apt to click on it. I've learned through the conditioning that those brands have given me that the uptime, reliability speed issues are problems.

Same thing with pricing. So I think Radian6 is an absolutely phenomenal product. I've heard great things about it, met the CEO, know some people there. Terrific product. Way too expensive! No way that I can justify affording it. Right now, I'm using Google Alerts and some combination of Google searches that I do every day, some other brand monitoring stuff that SEOmoz is working on in beta, the Blogscape Project, which of course I get kind of alpha access to.

Pricing is wrapped in there by necessity. When you worry, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm attracting all these visitors. They're not converting or they're not taking this action." They may have heard, or they may know, or they may have seen that your pricing simply doesn't match their market, or they have fears around that. That's why I'm such a big fan of transparency here, because I think that you will weed out and save your salespeople time, and save your customer service people time, and save your website bandwidth, if you're transparent about this most of the time.

Features and perceived features. Features is: Do you do the thing that I want you to do? When I'm talking about features, I could mean in software. I could mean in a product, like I'm buying a digital camera, I'm buying a car, I'm buying a whiteboard pen, I'm buying a subscription to a software service. I'm looking purely for information. The features are: Do you do the things that I want you do to? Oftentimes, that comes through brand perception as well.

So I know that a lot of the times when I visit an eHow type of website, that it doesn't have the features that I want, which is a reliable source that I know I can trust. Wikipedia's the same way. I only semi-trust Wikipedia, and I trust it on some topics and not others, and I always want to back it up with something else from some reliable source where I know the person there or I know the brand there, because Wikipedia could be edited by anybody, and I don't necessarily know who's behind it.

So those types of brands, and this is even true sometimes at About.com, where the writers in some categories are phenomenal. Southern food, I think is terrific. Some of the digital marketing ones are good. Some of them are mediocre. It's a trust factor around the features and the perception of features. Perception of features is often very different from actual features.

We find, for example, when we survey customers of SEOmoz that they have no idea that we actually will help track their Facebook pages, Insights data over time, and their Twitter data over time. Many people don't even know that Open Site Explorer and SEOmoz are offered in the same subscription. So this is clearly a problem that we have had on perception of features, not even on actual features.

Presentation. The way and the style in which the features and the information and the pricing and reliability and the uptime, all of that is presented is another big one. The thing about presentation is that it's a layer that impacts everything else, not just up here, but down here as well. It's often done terribly, terribly wrong on the Web.

Because it ties so much to the, "Do I like and trust these people," let's talk about those. This question, when you ask the question, "Do I like and trust the brand, and the people behind the brand," that goes to a bunch of inputs that are very, very far removed, all so far removed from traditional CRO stuff. That's things like design and UX, which we talk about many times here on Whiteboard Friday and on the site. Higher quality, more professional, more consistent with what your audience is looking for, just does a fantastically better job than, "Oh yeah, we bought some stock photography of some people in an office working, and don't they look attractive, don't they have perfect skin? And now, you know, that's our homepage, and then there's Services, and Contact, and About. Great, we have a professional website!" No, you don't. No, no, you don't!

Design UX isn't just about that. There are other inputs like domain name and brand name. One of the biggest reasons that I'm often against exact- match domains is because it is so tremendously hard to build up any sort of branding. If you name industries, you will very, very rarely hear that the generic, exact-match domain for what we call that industry is a market leader, a brand leader, and because of that and also because, to be totally fair, a lot of people in the domaining sphere and the affiliate marketing and SEO sphere noticed the power that these had in Google and abused them tremendously. So now consumers have an association, particularly savvy consumers have an association, a brand association with exact-match domains. That is, "Oh, that's probably a low-quality site. That's probably not the real brand. I don't know if I can trust it if I click on that," versus actual brand names.

I'll give you some very good examples. In the world of office supplies I've heard of Staples, right? I've heard of OfficeMax. I've heard of Office Depot. But if it's OfficeSupplies.net, I'm sure someone owns that domain. It could even be someone awesome. Maybe it's a great site, but if I see it in the search results, I'm going to be mighty suspicious. That suspicion just naturally creeps in. That's why domain name and brand name are so tied together in the perception of trust and can substantially impact things like click-through rate and conversion rate and subscription rate, etc.

Accessibility of contact information. It's funny, I was just on an e-mail thread yesterday night, and some folks in the SEO sphere said, hey, have you ever heard of this particular - it was an enterprise SEO software provider. I went, "No, I haven't heard of them. This is the first time. Let me go check out their site." I see they try and say a few futures, but there's literally nothing, no one mentioned on the site; no people who are using it, no people who are associated with the brand. The contact information is "Fill out a contact form" or "Here's our office." I think it was somewhere in the United States; I can't remember exactly where. But other than a mailing address and a phone number, there was no human being listed, which made me very suspicious, because why would you not show off the team? Like, here's the exec team behind it. Here are our engineers. That kind of transparency is natural in the software world. Something's weird if it doesn't exist there.

Being able to find that information - a phone number, e-mail, contact forms, here's our Twitter and our Facebook, and these kinds of things - you just expect those from web companies. When they don't exist, you become highly suspicious.

The authenticity of the content. One of my favorite examples is there's a brand that's been doing a ton of fantastic infographics. I think it's MBAonline or MBAeducation.com, one of the online education providers with a very generic name. They really do great infographics. They sponsor some awesome stuff. Sometimes they'll get featured on a Mashable or even a TechCrunch, or something like that. Tremendous work, excellent work getting that brand out there.

But I always look at them and think this doesn't have a relationship with what the services that you're trying to sell, which is you're an affiliate for a bunch of online education providers, which can be a little bit of a nasty, sort of spammy, aggressive field. The challenge here is, hey, yes, you've got the infographic, you've got the link. But when you're trying to tie back into consumers and earn their business, those of us who are savvy and sophisticated, we sort of get a funny feeling, like something doesn't match up. The content is not authentic to the brand. Why is it being produced?

I think a great example of this is OkTrends, which is OkCupid's blog. They essentially have dating content that matches up with what people are looking for from their site. So, here's how to optimize your dating profile, and by the way, we're a dating website. Great, makes perfect sense.

Hey, here's an infographic about the rise of Twitter or Twitter click- through rates or something - and by the way, we're an MBA online education provider. Why is that? It seems like it's just for the links and attention and awareness and has nothing to do with the actual brand. Highly suspicious, particularly in spheres that are very aggressive.

Industry reputation, word of mouth. I'll give you another example. So, there was another provider that was mentioned on this string in the SEO enterprise space. No, I'm sorry. It was another enterprise software provider, but not in SEO. There were some comments of, "Oh, hey, should we use this? Should we use this other one?" Someone remarked on an e-mail thread, "You know, the CEO of this particular company has treated women employees very badly."

You would never find that on the Web, right? That's not information that you're going to see. If you start searching for reviews, you won't find it on their website. It's something that's word-of-mouth only, but it's made its way to enough influencers that now that is an influential thing in the perception of, "Do I like the brand and the people?" Very frankly, I trust this source, and I know the source knows the CEO there, and I don't. I'm probably not going to buy from this particular enterprise software provider, even if they meet my needs up here. This is the type of stuff that influences conversion rate, that is so subtle and so hidden, that you're never going to realize it from a traditional CRO-type of perspective. And yet, it pays huge dividends to go and investigate this stuff and understand that perception.

The final one that I'll mention here is familiarity with the brand and social proof of the brand. A great example here, go to SurveyMonkey's website. If you're not logged in, the homepage is a woman from Facebook, her picture, she's a statistical analyst there, and she's giving an endorsement to SurveyMonkey. Now, Facebook is a phenomenal brand; they're very well-known. Their business practices are respected. People know that they're a great data-driven company, and so the fact that they trust SurveyMonkey strongly suggests SurveyMonkey must be a great provider. So, they've created that social proof, and they're using a brand that you're familiar with.

When you combine those things, it's absolutely excellent and incredibly powerful. When I go to websites and I see a lot of social proof from either people that are anonymous or people that provide only their fist name or people that I don't know, it's less powerful. When I have seen a brand, six, seven, eight times on the Web, at a conference, in various types of ways - I've heard from someone over e-mail, I know someone who's used them, I've had an experience with someone from that company - those types of things strongly influence these. Building up all of this builds up your conversion rates and builds up all of these metrics that you think about as an online marketer, and yet, we often have so little control or so little even ability to judge and record these things.

What I want to suggest is that, to those of you who are doing web marketing, when you're thinking about these metrics, remember that these are all inputs. Don't necessarily use them as excuses, but make sure that you're taking some action on them. Make sure that you're finding ways to measure them. Make sure that these aren't the reasons why your rates over here are low, rather than the stuff that you focus on, because it can be incredibly frustrating to find that, hey, the reason that we're not making good sales is because no one is familiar with our brand, and we don't have the right social proof, rather than, oh, it's because I didn't write the title tags correctly, and I don't have a compelling description for the content, and the page isn't optimized well. It doesn't have a good flow and conversion process and funnel. Sometimes these two things are mixed up together, and I worry about those hidden factors.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

55 Comments

I think design & UX is one of the most underestimated aspects. I continually judge the companies I interact with based upon their site and design (mostly online companies, I don't hold small or local businesses to the same standard).

Also totally agreed on transparent pricing. If a company makes pricing a hassle, I'll bounce. If I have to give them my contact info and I know I'm going to get calls and emails from their business development staff for months, I'll just leave. There's always someone else with clear pricing, and they're probably more clear about a number of other aspects as well. It's not worth my time to much through their sales process just to complete my buying process.

I publish pricing info for all services on my site. The calls I get are pre-conditioned and understand my pricing, so I rarely get tire kickers, and price is rarely a discussion point. I can focus on more important things like how much the client is willing to be active in their marketing and content production, and other essentials to getting a client up and running. Not applicable to every business, but it works well for mine.

Glad to see you snuck social proof in at the end. Seeing that xxxx people are Facebook fans and seeing 8 faces in the Like Box is such a big trust indicator - it seems like it's almost the de facto seal of approval nowadays.

I like this whiteboard friday. Very informative. There is one more hidden factor which i think is so powerfult that it can literally make or break your brand and that is your values, beliefs, attitude, culture, actions and ideology as a company and as an individual. Godaddy is a good example. GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons generally hit the news for all the wrong reasons. Sometime for butchering an elephant, sometime for supporting SOPA. His company has faced boycott and has lost tons of clients because of this. Godaddy has a terrific product but the person behind the brand is not so terrific. He does not appeal to his customers on an emotional level and this is what influencing their buying decision in somewhat negative way. This issue can't be resolved through any a/b or mutivarite testing. It can only be resolved by improving your image as an individual and as a brand. This is one of the main reason why big brands get involved in charity and philanthropic work.

At the end the good people will succed. If you are a decent guy with good manners than you will have good PR and therefore you will succed. This is true. Now more than ever. That's why dictators fail. The internet puts a light on all the bad things they do and the people do not accept this. Companies can not effort anymore to misbehave in any way. It will spread very fast into the social networks on the internet and that is the end of it.

Yes this is very frustrating and I have experienced this many times. I have run into multiple different clients that actually don’t care about their site, product, service, or reputation. It drives me crazy when a company asks me to do work for them and I say, “Well I’ve never seen your site or patronized your business, but I have already heard that people dislike you and you have ripped people off”. So I can do all the work in the world and get you the best possible exposure, but you have to start taking time to actually care about producing a good product and what people think about you and making them happy, otherwise it is just like you say Rand, “They are going to find you #1, but they already know your brand is a poor product so they aren’t going to click”. And then the client will ask me Why? And I simply reply, REALLY?

I actually had a client ask me why their site was converting so poorly when they had all the top listings and in the same sentence asked me how much I would charge for reputation management :-) LMAO!!! I looked at the negative comments about them in the search engines and found they had at least the first 3 pages with 95% of the comments or articles negative and from sites like the New York Times, CNN, Etc.

I let the client go…

Not because I couldn’t do it though I’m not sure I could somehow pushdown 30 negative comments from big TRUSTED brands 10 -20 places down, but rather becausethey didn’t care enough to do things right in the first place. They obviously were not the best people on the planet and they wanted me to make them look good. If you have a bad comment from an unknown site, then it could be a mistake or just a bad day, but when you have the top 30 places in Google with bad comments and articles from major brands, it isn’t a mistake or a bad day, you are a bad person or a bad company. Not even God can help you spoof Google that much :-) Besides even if you could push them all down, there is still going to be more to come.

Totally hear you dude. This happened many times when we were consulting, too. I think half the consulting battle is picking clients as carefully as you pick employees (at least, once your dealflow is robust enough that you can afford to be choosy - our first few years we had to take anything that came in).

Mark, I tweeted at you earlier but wanted to ensure you got the sentiment and I didn't want to waste any puns... Spot on with your sentiment - You could do RM for the devil but the 'overhead' work would be hellish haha

Rand, great video! A few weeks ago, I saw a slide show about the importance of building brand trust (http://www.slideshare.net/nickblack/brand-trust-the-six-drivers-of-trust-2193957). There's a lot of fluff in the presentation, but their primary result is that there are 6 drivers of trust for businesses and brands: Stability, Innovation, Relationship, Practical Value, Vision, and Competence. I'm not advocating their research as the gospel for brand marketing, but I enjoyed seeing the overlap between these 6 drivers and the items you presented. Maybe they were actually on to something ;-)

A great Lilac Board Friday, Rand! It's easy to spend so much time in the details and analytics to forget all the other factors that drive a business forward - so many which are out of the control of the SEO but truly an integral part of the overall "marketing" of the firm.

I think TRUST is the key factor and thank you Rand for reminding me that and showing me ways and tools to build trust for my brand. It opend my eyes that SEO is not everything. Best example is the speaking domain name. Thanks. YOU ARE MY GURU :-)

Great WBF! I definitely agree that we need to get away from online tunnel vision as someone said and remember the company itself. If we track back to the days before online commerce and remember what makes a good business, and then incorporate that into our SEO strategy (the term SEO is getting looser and looser) we will be much better off.

Thanks Rand for this Whiteboard Friday, it is probably my favourite one.

I find it so easy to forget that Online Marketing is not just about Online. When we are marketing a Brand / Product / Company online there are a lot of offline factors coming into play.

No point having the best website if the reputation of the company or the quality of the product or product delivery or payment option is known not to be trusted or unreliable. Sometime the best way to optimise the website performance is to make adjustments to the offline marketing or general reputation online and offline.

Reputation management is hard to quantify but it should be part of all analysis on whether the website is performing or not. As you mentioned it is not an excuse but it could be part of an explanation.

Wow Rand, great points and areas to focus on while avoiding traditional CRO tunnel vision. CRO is necessary but on its own not sufficient. Great job covering subtle aspects with awesome examples to make it real. Love the Survey Monkey/Facebook social proof example. Actually checked it out on their site. Impressive for Survey Monkey. This WBF reminds me of a quote from the recent Paul Roetzer Marketing Agency Blueprint book that I am currently reading:, "Marketing campaigns are not about winning awards for creative, building the flashiest websites, gaming Google for higher rankings ... The job of a marketing agency is to produce results that impact the bottom line. It's that simple." Paying close attention factors influencing the answers to the 2 questions you pose is how marketing suceeds in impacting the bottom line and ROI.

It seems like this year Rand has decided to bring the debate on inbound marketing sphere; that's Good. Where are my customers? What their needs are? How can i help them...these basic questions are at the heart of any webmarketing strategy and are coming back nowadays. SEO for SEO is finish, SEO for business needs and customers satisfaction is the new deal!

Actually one of my websites that has a name similar to OfficeSupplies.net... worse probably. I did not spend much time developing it. Thanks god. You made me think and you are absolutely right - not a good name, sounds dodgy, noody will take it seriously and remember it. When I bought this domain name I was thinking purely from SEO prospective. Will change it. Thanks Rand.

Great. On the similar lines of page load and design I strongly believe it is very important to improve your understanding of what technology your visitors use so you can configure your website to optimize their visit experience.

And on building trust about products/services, provider or someone from the brand should be available to customers who has questions/convern on the products/services and need to spend sometime in clarifying customers questions or providing more information such as having a online chat option on the website,etc.

Good video. Many things are behind the scenes and many things are psychological in nature. Studying and understanding the thought sequence of the users is super important...This is why we play extra emphasis on this.

I agree completely with your analysis. When slowly nuturing leads on Twitter or Facebook with quality content, if our site don't back up the same feel, the lead will be lost (will bounce) upon our landing pages.

The same voice of quality in UX, content and trust needs to span over all of our properties to work effectively to capture the most qualified leads.

At first glance this white board seemed pretty marketing 101 and I wasn't too intereted in watching, however you did some great analysis Rand on some of these. I like the analysis on brand name vs domain name

Thanks Rand. I like to see SEO discussed in the context of wider marketing issues. It can't be viewed in isolation, or important opportunities and threats are missed, in search and other offline and online channels.

It's no good just doing SEO if your prices render you unable to compete, or if your product isn't what customers want.

There is no room for someone to disagree on this matter! What happens lot of the times is (has happened to me in the past) that you didn’t have problems on the title tag, you didn’t have the problem with your features and description and sometimes even you are ranking well for the competitive keyphrases but even then this didn’t produce you good amount of sales... at this point Traditional CRO stuff is not the time to invest but one should look deep in to the website...

Prising can be one of the factors especially when the product is software or similar kind of thing, people usually are not simply to going to go to the website and buy it right away but they will compare prices from other providers.

Reviews is another important thing to consider, even if you provide a product/services at a competitive prices (cheap is another question in itself) potential buy will look more in to reviews and feedback from the people who are actually using you.

Face, I am glad that you mention this thing... most people think that creating a website with an attractive logo is all that is going to work and now people will eventually start trusting them... IMO this is not the case, people have to come at the front, they should come up with real faces so that people can trust them... no one can trust on logos but it’s easy to trust on humans that actually exist... SEOmoz team is the real world example!

Social Value is way more important now... if you are in the sphere and no one is talking about you on forums, social networks... this can actually bring a question WHY?

Another thing that I really loved that you mention is the exact match domain...It is always good not to go with it but using a keyword in the domain with some other word is a better option...

Good job on the WBF this week, opened up my eyes to some things. One of my clients has a domain name that is “optimized” www . hotelaccommodationgauteng . co.za (I added space to not spam links). However, he has lost business due to people that know his company, look at his url: and think it is an agency and that they don’t want to look through a hundred companies to find his company. So when you talk about the url’s and how they can affect your website in a negative way: I know all about it.

Which if I may brings me to a question, one of my clients wants us to rebuild and design her website, she is however concerned that she will lose her Page Rank. We are basically going to break all links to the current pages and re-build everything. Will she lose her Page Rank – if so, how do I go about this without losing her Page Rank? -

So I'm obviously not Rand, but I can help you with your question. The most SEO-friendly solution to your PageRank problem is to create the new pages, and then, redirect the old URLs to those new pages (using 301 HTTP redirects). For example, the site you mentioned above has a page about executive suites at www.hotelaccommodationgauteng.co.za/hotel_accommodation_rooms_facilities.html. If you create a new executive suites page on the redesigned site at www.newsite.co.za/executive-suites.html, you would simply redirect the old URL to this new one. It looks like your site is running IIS 7.5 so you can find more information about implementing 301 HTTP redirects with IIS here: http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/httpRedirect

That was a great Whiteboard Friday Rand! It's true that traditional marketing elements such as branding and trust highly influence success rates. Nonetheless we sometimes seem to suffer from online tunnel vision syndrome.

I think this is very insightful, especially the discussion of domain names. I would argue that in the case of Staples, and OfficeMax, those are recognizable brands that would stand out from something like internetofficesupplies.com because of their reputation. That doesn’t mean that internetofficesupplies.com can’t achieve the same standing and enjoy a boost in traffic along the way, much in the way that “overstocks.com” or others who have come from nowhere could attest.

I feel strongly that local businesses local businesses can benefit greatly from with citynamebusienss.com, especially when the page title tag spells out “Merchant City Name Business”

Thanks for inspiring brand-related thoughts, Rand. I like these sentiments coming from this platform because the message is more powerful; while a brand can spend days, weeks, months, years... addressing online marketing/SEO objectives, brand awareness initiatives (equally important - moreso IMO) can get pushed to the wayside or altogether neglected.

I especially would like to know the community's thoughts regarding brand social accounts. Do you champion accounts, brandishing the company name, while a distinctive person, operating the account, is 'hidden' behind the brand/logo forgoing their 'identity' but 'personifying' the brand personality? For instance, I like how Roger has kind of taken on a personality of his own for the SEOmoz brand. I think it works for Moz but the established brand was there before Twitter.

Should brands have a 'person' leveraging social accounts? Or is it particular to the brand, industry, target market? I would like to read some thoughts....

It's a tough call and really depends on who you are and what you're doing. Having brand advocates who are internal employees is great, but I do think a brand needs an account of their own that can be run by multiple people or you lose scalability. While it's tough to give that "entity" personality and warmth, it's also a huge win when you can.